In this special issue we present the conference papers by the study group “Crisis and Crisis Scenarios: Normativity, Possibilities and Dilemmas” atthe 2014 NSU Summer Session, held between 24th July and 31st July 2014 in Sauðárkrókur, Northern Iceland.

An examination of the possibly right or true values involves a deep reflection on human life and the nature of values, and that includes all aspects of human life – i.e. includes basically our relationship to nature: to surrounding nature and ourselves. On this background we might discover the problematic relationship of human beings to nature on the basis of destructions of nature and of climate-change, but we might also start the other way round and ask: which are the true values and why? And then in contrast to these true and positive values ask: which values are false and destructive values?

In this paper I investigate the concept of responsibility in the context of technological innovation, with reference to two types of responsibility: ex post and ex ante responsibility. Exposing the shortcomings of ex post responsibility in the context of innovation, I examine different ways of conceiving of a form of ex ante responsibility suitable for our current technological situation. Here I identify two positions with very different approaches to the question of the ethical status of responsibility: Hans Jonas’s concept of responsibility as an ethical principle structuring moral behavior, and René von Schomberg’s idea of responsibility as “responsiveness” linked to procedures of communication and collaboration. Rejecting von Schomberg’s concept on ethico-philosophical grounds, I argue in favor of a critical rehabilitation of some basic thoughts in the philosophy of Jonas. Finally, I suggest taking the step from the Jonasian ethics of responsibility towards the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit – a concrete social morality that disentangles responsibility from the dilemmas of subjectivist morality.

In this paper I outline Castoriadis’ 1965 talk entitled “The Crisis of Modern Society”, wherebyhe individuates two general critical elements of modernity and five specific ones. The two general elements are: (1) While human ingenuity gives rise to more and more complex technological applications of scientific knowledge, our capacity to steer human society towards a harmonious order decreases; (2) Progressive changes such as alleged prosperity and seemingly less cruel living conditions for most of the people are undeniable, yet dissatisfaction and constant conflicts appear more than in most other known historical societies. The five specific elements are: (1) axiological; (2) work-related; (3) political; (4) familial; (5) educational. In addition, I offer some reflections connecting Castoriadis’ talk with previous contributions of mine to the NSU research group #3 and also furthering such contributions in a novel subject area: higher education.

The world of the future will not be one without wars. The many hopes we have about a future peace governed by a more or less confederal state will not make wars obsolete. Regular wars and irregular wars will continue and probably on different subjects than we are used to. The article proposes that the form of war will be more about temporalities, i.e. fast interchanges or, rather, more risky protracted wars of attrition and exhaustion and less on tactical well defined territories. The West can neither dominate such wars nor establish one world that is ruled or even governed. The risk is that we have the systems we have. They have their own path dependencies, their temporal bindings and their own stories to tell. In the worst case, the West sticks to an imaginary of almighty power – and then it will lose. We tend to forget that our present past will be experienced and told differently in the future. The “extreme 20th century” will have another history and another impact. Its extremes will be narrated as more extreme, and its temporal bindings become easier to observe. The much celebrated “revolutions in military affairs” will not dominate future war systems. Unipolarity is fading away. Kantian convergences may appear.

The years between 2006 and 2008 are key in understanding the Icelandic economic crisis. One of the main questions one gets when discussing the lessons from Iceland is: Was the quick recovery due to how the country ‘burned’ the creditors? Myth has it that when things got tough for the banks, the Icelandic government denied to bail them out and the country therefore escaped the difficult long-term consequence felt by, for example, Ireland. But that is a serious distortion of what happened. The Icelandic banks were on Central Bank life support from 2006 to 2008. It was only when the CBI ran out of steam that an alternative approach in crisis management was put in place. For admirers of historical contingencies, this case is of interest. Iceland did not take a calculated decision to let the banks fail, but an attempted bail-out failed. This meant that that its tackling of a banking crisis took an unexpected turn as banks were put into administration; a move only considered in the face of failure. And despite the route taken by Iceland, the total cost of the economic crisis for the State has surpassed Ireland’s and is one of the costliest any sovereign has faced in the ongoing crisis. This is interesting, given the ongoing discussion about the Icelandic ‘miraculous’ escape from an economic crisis and that the possibilities countries face during crisis management may be many more than those that are discussed.

Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) has become a bestseller in the world. Two month after its publication, it had sold more than 200.000 copies, and this success will surely continue for a long time. Piketty has established a new platform to discuss political economy.

The Danish welfare state constitutes a paradigmatic case of the welfare struggle of modern welfare states. Taking care of vulnerable children and youths is used as a case study here, to illustrate the efforts of the welfare state to acquire legitimacy as a body of public administration. That is, the efforts to close the gap between the welfare state´s ideology of doing what is ‘good’ for its citizens and doing this in practice. In this article, we analyze this struggle for legitimacy of the Danish welfare state with illustrations based on the case study. We present the concepts of biopower and moral blindness, in order to test the legitimacy of the welfare state´s provision of welfare services at the beginning of this century. We propose a new paradigm to improve the welfare state´s legitimacy. Our case is considered critical.

The starting point of this paper is Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis that the introduction of philosophical truth into politics leads to tyrannical or totalitarian outcomes. A critique of this diagnosis is offered on the basis of Michel Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France where he discussed the practices of parr?sia, “truth-telling,” as multiple forms of political life of resistance, critique, and contestation. The common denominator of all parrh?siasticpractices is that none of them are concerned with “doctrines.” That is, none of them are concerned with laying out the “content” of politics. After the paper has identified and expounded four different manifestations of parr?sia—“political”(Pericles), “philosophical”(Plato), “philosophical-ethical”(Socrates) and “ethical”(Diogenes the Cynic)—an argument is presented for a kinship, instead of a difference, between Foucault and Arendt as parrh?siastic or critical thinkers within the same tradition of political Kantianism.